[Illustration: THE VALE OF LLANGOLLEN.] But to return to Whitehurst Toll-house awhile. There the “fertile and happy” Vale of Llangollen first opens out before the traveller in a deep, long, and narrow vista closed by mountainous hills. It is the gate by which one enters the romantic land of Wales, that lies there in the setting sun like a Promised Land flowing with milk, honey, and _cwrw_; the river Dee sparkling in the distance, and the last sunrays lighting with a magic glow the hillsides and the precipitous Eglwyseg Rocks. A mediæval knight coming upon this profound valley and these crannied precipices would have halted and offered up the prayer, _In manus tuas Domine_, before going on his way, for the Unknown hid many terrors in those days, and Loathly Worms and unimaginable horrors might then have peopled the rocks. To the modern stranger, with none of these terrors, the scene also calls a halt. He sees the sun go down, lighting the hill-top roofs of Cefn and Acrefair with a mysterious glow, and glinting redly in the serried windows of Wynnstay; lights come out in cottage windows as day draws in, and signal lamps shine red and green on the great railway viaduct crossing the valley immediately beneath him; and it is well if he comes to this spot ignorant and unprepared, for then those colliery villages of Acrefair and Cefn, and the distant smoky shafts of Ruabon, hold many mysteries; the histories of the great railway viaduct and the canal aqueduct of Pont Cysylltau in the middle distance do not put a curb to his imagination, and the dim outline of Wynnstay, majestic in the crepuscule, might be not merely the French Renaissance and very Mansard-roofy, Alexandra-Palace-like residence of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, the local magnate, but a fairy palace. Nor need the fiery dragon that should inhabit the fairy-like and mysterious landscape be missing, for the lighted trains that come down the valley and cross the viaduct in thunder can well sustain the part to the eye. It is surely in some early autumn evening, when stormy weather threatens not too insistent, and when kindly mists hide the hill-tops, rendering unlimited their possibilities of height and cragginess, that the exploring cyclist, say, should come to the Vale of Llangollen, previously uninstructed in what he is to find there on the morrow. It is to be premised, however, that he be not an unimaginative man. Let all such reach Llangollen by train in the glaring sun of a July afternoon, when everything is revealed, and imagination finds its occupation gone.